I finished the ebook project! When I started with this, I just got all of the files together and pressed “convert” in Calibre (an ebook manager). That crashed my PRS-T1 though :s.
After the holidays, despite it being too late to be of use now, I still had an itch to scratch. Well, I scratched it :) Took me a while and it got me back into sed-scripting (this page was a wonderful resource). Why sed-scripting? Well, I wanted to basically do “batch”-vi – that is, use the power of search-and-replace with regular expressions over a group of files. Roughly, there are 3 straightforward options: Perl, sed, and awk. Of these, I picked sed — it allows you to just type your regexps just as you would in vi :) Of course, they got a little more complicated after a while:
# row for total distance
/Total distance:<.td>$/ {
N
N
N
s/\n/ /g
s#\s*\(Tot.*tance:</td>\) \(.*\)#<tr><td>\1<td>\ </td><td>\2</tr>#
}
Not much, just a little. Near the end, several times I figured to be done when the lay-out on the devices themselves would be rather bad. But: no more crashing — definitely an improvement. And then, finally, the last tweaks were made, the last sed-script was run, and it was over! Hooray! To celebrate, I made two versions: one for my Kindle DX version (mobi) and one for my Sony Reader version (epub). (No clue if there’s any specific tweaks Calibre adds based on the device, but you can select specific devices for the “output profile”, and I did.)
If you’re interested in a copy of the book, drop me a line.
And, as a bonus, here’s the cover of the book: a photo of La Palma from the International Space Station.
I had to wake up way too early on Friday to get to my 7:10 plane to Vienna.Funnily enough, by the way, I managed to squeeze everything into one piece of carry-on luggage. Not sure yet on whether or not I’ll do that again for the next hop — I do appreciate some more leg space, but I’ll have a transfer and I also appreciate having everything there. To ponder about. Anyway, I got up way too early, wasted time at the airport and touched down near Vienna. Then, I hopped on a train to Graz and got moving to Baptiste and Katherina.
Where were we? We’d climbed up to Teide, I danced on the volcano, and then we descended to the top of the cable cart. The route we planned (to Pico Viejo and beyond) was closed, so we decided to abort the plan and take the cable cart down. On the way down the cart operator pointed out some native mountain sheep — but I didn’t spot them. At the cable cart base station, we treated ourselves to a brunch and sat down to figure our plans out.
For me, this was a completely new experience. Luckily, Agnieszka had done this before, and she struck up a conversation quickly. The Danish couple that had picked us up were about our age, and had rented a car to explore Tenerife. For a brief while, that sounded quite appealing to me. Rent a car, and explore the country side together with your girl. You could find all these wonderful spots … hmmms. The parts where we had walked, were inaccessible by car. And they were pretty damn amazing. And actually, with this car, there were some nice views too, but we were mostly speeding through them, not really having the time to admire them. Upon reflection, the hiking sounded slightly better.
There were the obligatory cheers, celebratory hugs and group- and individual photos (as you can see). Moreover, I did what any self-conscious Dutchman with a slight familiarity with Dutch music would do: /preview/176-small.jpg "Hugo, the highest man in all of Spain! (flash)")
10-15 agonising minutes later, Aga showed up. She seemed cold and tired (or was that just in the eye of the beholder? Probably a mix of both :), but I was happy to see her there, and proud of her to have made it up. I know it must’ve been hard for her, but she made it. She even posed for a picture in the cold winds on top, as you can see. Afterwards, we went back down. The firemen were going back to the shelter, but there was no way I was going to go down over all that ice!!
And I can add that the secondary effects (that is, the burning sensation) was present too. Admittedly, it was all doable, but it wasn’t a stroll in the park. I was very happy that we had a hotel room with bath tub, foot bath, mini bar, restaurant and (the best part) decent beds! I also think it helped us a lot, we were both more or less done for.
So, this morning, we took things relatively slowly. Moreover, we diligently prepared for the sun, me by applying copious amounts of the wrong stuff — foot cream on my face :). We checked out by 12, and skipped breakfast. The idea was to have a brunch at the base station of the cable car (“Teleferique”). It was only about 2km away, and there was a asphalt road running there, so we should be there in half an hour. Right?
Bingo. Since we started off easy, and figured we had sufficient time today, we took the nice route and not the asphalt road. Our reasoning was that it would be prettier, nicer to walk, and much less cars to dodge. We were right on all accounts. Hooray! In addition, it was also more sandy – more beachy, if you will. You know, the dense stuff, which saps your energy. You can almost feel the ground siphoning off energy from your legs. Before the start of this day’s hike, I think both of us silently envisioned the first part as the relaxed 30 minutes before waking up. Not quite, apparently. It took a while (about an hour and a half, as a matter of fact), but we finally made it back to asphalt. By then, a solid ground was a blessing.
We were also right below the base station of the Teleferique. Nice! Not so nice part: it was quite a bit higher up, and we needed to take the long way round to get there. Luckily, this time we were on asphalt, so we made good time and in about 25 minutes, we finally found us at the restaurant. Yup, somewhat behind schedule, but okay: breakfast time! By then it was actually lunch time, which was extra nice, seeing as the restaurant provided a nice, hot lunch buffet. We dipped in, sat down, took off shoes and socks (and earned ourselves some funny looks at that), and took it easy for about an hour and a half. Well, we earned it, no?
After that break, we treated ourselves to an ice cream and walked back down to the main road (around 14:00). We followed the main road until we hit the start of the track up El Teide. It was “light”, as in “doable by a car”. The road was also wide enough for a car, as you can see from the pictures. Immediately at the start, we were confronted with our current elevation: even though it was 25 degrees and we were hiking in shorts, the shadows still held snow! A short while later, we had elevated enough for the landscape to open up,
and wide vistas became available. It was truly gorgeous. I have to admit, that I was beginning to worry a bit about our schedule. We started upon this wide track at roughly 16:00, and the information sign at the beginning warned that it was a 4.5 hours hike to the refuge. That would mean we’d be hiking up the mountain in the dark – something I was definitely not looking forward to, even though with this road it’d be okay.
Of course, to compound my worries, Aga started showing signs of height-induced fatigue. She was having a hard time breathing. That’s at least what she said it felt like – I couldn’t (and can’t) relate to it, as I didn’t have any problems at all. It was weird to see the sporty girl slowing down to the point where I was actually making better progress than her. I took the opportunity to deprive her of her camera, and kept myself behind her by starting to take pictures whenever I threatened to overtake her. It was fun, and it led to quite a number of pictures (you can do the 
While hiking up along the road, we were at one point overtaken by a pair of runners. They were wearing running-only gear, with a bottle at the back. Apparently, they were doing some serious training… the road constantly went up. Hard stuff! At any rate, we kept up, and didn’t see them again while the road kept going up. By now, we both had changed into something warmer, as the wind was too cool for comfort, and at this road, we were just too exposed. There was no shelter – I diligently applied sun cream (not foot cream – once was enough ;) at every rest stop. The snow was becoming more annoying. Where first it was an interesting phenomena on the side, at times it now was running over the road to such an extent that the only way onwards was over the snow. As I was wearing sneakers, and as we still had to get to the hard part, I really didn’t want to get my feet wet. Luckily enough, the snow wasn’t melting, and my feet stayed dry.
Then we came upon the steep uphill part. There was a clear break: the car-passable part of the road ended, and a footpath began. As you can see from the height profiles below, the slope of the first part was ± 500m per ± 11km, while the slope of part deux was roughly ± 450m per ± 2.4km(!). Le ouch. Oh, and there was a new information sign. The sign gave no duration, only a severe warning: only do this if you’re in top-notch condition! I felt up to it, but by now Aga was clearly not having an easy time… and it was about six o’clock. Ah well, nothing for it now, we were committed. So, up we went.
After about half an hour, we encountered the runners again, on the way down. They had actually ran up this steep ascent?! Holy cow, that’s some training! They gave us an estimate of how long we still had to go. Actually, they gave two: 25 minutes and 40 minutes. In the end, both estimates were off by about more or less one hour. It got colder, Aga got grumpier and more quiet, it got darker, and there was little I could do. The road was, incidentally, a lot more adventurous now: far steeper, less wide, and more snow. All in all, a lot more interesting.
There was a group of about 10 Italians, with whom we were sharing the room. Moreover, there was a large contingent of “Bombaderos” – firemen from one of the other Canarian Islands. About 30 of them. All in all, the refuge was about full! Luckily we called ahead – something I hadn’t thought necessary, but this time, I was happy we had done so.
Despite our lateness, we weren’t the last to show up. When we were having dinner, we joined a table where a Polish guy and a Brit, who had come in after us, were sitting. The Brit was shivering. He introduced himself as Warren, and didn’t have a bite to eat. He expected that there’d be something here. Naturally, we couldn’t leave him like that. Aga had prepared a wonderful insta-cream soup, which genuinely filled. On top of that, we had our emergency sandwiches from Hotel Parador, in case we went crazy with hiking (to the top of Teide and down again in one day). Despite Warren’s adamant refusal, we supplied him, and you could see the life flowing in him as the soup warmed him from the inside.
After dinner, we took a few photos of the incredible views (see also below, click for the big link), including the mighty shadow of El Teide him(her?)self. In the setting sun, this shadow extended all the way to the next island (Las Palmas). Mind you, that’s a few hours by boat from the coast, and we were nowhere near the coast. Later, I tried to take some pics of the fantastically clear night sky. It 
And we do. After freshening up for a while, and changing into more appropriate attire, we head out for dinner, picking our ids up on the way. After a short confusion, it turns out Aga had a specific restaurant at Playa de las Americas in mind. If you 
Aga surprises the waiter by offering the 2 euros she was short last time she ate here. The waiter surprises us by speaking Dutch with me. I surprise Aga by being 
As some of you may know, I took one of my guitars (geez that sounds bad, let me restart…)
So when I came back, I figured that all this playing ought to have paid off a bit. Guitar Wednesday came, and I picked up the guitar confidently. Now, as I may or may not have mentioned, for various reasons, the guitar lessons were cancelled about 5 times in a row. And I had hardly played till the Christmas holidays. But with all the playing then, I figured I wouldn’t be in too bad a shape.